Perianne is the CEO of Boring & Company, LLC, a financial services technology consulting firm. She served as an economic analyst in network broadcast news. Prior Perianne was a legislative analyst on Capitol Hill advising on economic, tax, and health care policy. She graduated with a degree in business and economics from the University of Florida. As a free market advocate, she also writes about macroeconomics and consumer finance.

BitPay Is Headed To The Moon And Richard Branson Is On The Spaceship

BitPay just became the bitcoin startup with the most venture funding and is on a mission to the moon. Today BitPay announces the completion of a Series A funding round of $30million, bringing their total investment to $32.7million. The effort led by Index Ventures brought several rock star investors including Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson, Jerry Yang, co-founder of YahooYahoo! Inc, and Jim Robinson of RRE Ventures into the fledging digital currency industry.

I reported yesterday on this unconfirmed rumor, and I’ve since spoken with BitPay CEO Tony Gallippi to confirm. He decided to go with Index Ventures to lead the funding because of their international presence. BitPay’s European market makes up about 30% of their business portfolio and is their fastest growing region. In order to have an adequate presence in foreign countries they looked to work with investors who have strategic foreign connections.

Tony Gillippi, BitPay CEO (Photo credit: BitPay)

“It was more about who can open doors and help us scale up, not who can write the biggest check.”

BitPay is the leading payment processor for bitcoin. The company specialize in setting up merchant accounts to accept bitcoin payments. Currently they are servicing over 30,000 merchants across the globe. This number is increasing exponentially. In September 2012 they were servicing 1,000 accounts. A year later in September 2013, BitPay had 10,000 merchant accounts. In the past 8 months that number has increased three fold.

Some of their most recognized customers include Shopify, WordPress, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, where he uses BitPay to accept bitcoin payments to travel to space. According to Gallippi, bitcoin is the perfect payment method for Virgin Galactic because the high cost transactions are irreversible and eliminate chargeback fraud. Since selling a handful of space tickets in bitcoin, Branson saw that bitcoin was making their payment system more efficient and decided to invest.

While BitPay is servicing astronaut and rock star owned businesses, their big named accounts only make up about 100 of their 30,000 accounts. The majority of companies using BitPay to accept bitcoin are small businesses that are benefitting from lower transaction fees, faster service, and increased security for fraudulent transactions. This week is National Small Business Week and in my article Small Businesses – And President Obama- Would Be Wise To Jump On The Bitcoin Spaceship, I elaborate on the antiquated credit / debit card payment system Bitcoin challenges. This is what caught investor Jim Robinson’s attention,

“I looked at the technology and am optimistic about the future of Bitcoin. The financial services industry has been slow to innovate and the archaic system we have in place is ready for an overhaul. Once merchants get on top of the basic learning curve, they will all want to accept digital currency because it’s just better.”

BitPay plans to use the funds to hire an additional 70 employees, most of which will be developers. Their main focus is to address scalability. As the leading merchant acquirer and growing at double-digit rates, they are preparing to take BitPay to a whole new level. However, with more users comes increased customer service demands and businesses are constantly asking for additional features such as accounting tools and tax reporting software.

In response to this demand, BitPay launched Bitcore, an open source JavaScript library where anyone can go to make a website that talks directly with the Bitcoin protocol, among other projects. Bitcore was introduced to give a trusted platform to spur further bitcoin innovation allowing BitPay to focus on what they do best, acquire merchants.

Bitcoin is currently sitting on a $5.6billion market capitalization. A year ago this number was just $1.3billion. The digital asset industry, which includes bitcoin, is estimated to be a trillion dollar industry by 2020. Sir Richard Branson started out as a small business owner, and now owns a conglomerate that will give you a ride to the moon. If you pay for your ride with bitcoin, you’ll be using the first truly universal currency!

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